We describe a system which can track a hand in a sequence of video frames and
recognize hand gestures in a user-independent manner. The system locates the hand
in each video frame and determines if the hand is open or closed. The tracking
system is able to track the hand to within 10 pixels of its correct location in
99.7{\%} of the frames from a test set containing video sequences from 18 different
individuals captured in 18 different room environments. The gesture recognition
network correctly determines if the hand being tracked is open or closed in 99.1{\%}
of the frames in this test set. The system has been designed to operate in real
time with existing hardware.